brought BA up to the standards of the competition, but the branding idea
was quite original. The £11 million advertising campaign followed the
Saatchi & Saatchi model of being aspirational. Michael Batt said of the cam-
paign:
Most other airlines’ advertising tends to be functionally based. When we
launched Club World some people couldn’t believe we weren’t going to
mention our new seat in the advertising. Instead, our advertisements are all
about business people succeeding.^11What we have done is not remarkable or new, though it happens to be in
this particular industry. It has given us increased organisational focus and far
greater understanding of our product.^12Club World was an immediate success and grew rapidly, opening up
markets such as Singapore and Australia. However, competitive response
was also quick, with 22 airlines relaunching their business classes between
1988 and 1990. Additional information about the offer of competitors is
shown in Table 6.2.1. For information on how BA’s services have devel-
oped, see Tables 6.2.2 and 6.2.3 and Figure 6.2.1.
Customer perceptions
BA needed to know whether the changes in the company were having an
effect where it mattered – with the customers. The perceptions of cus-
tomers were so important that BA set up a group, Market Place
Performance, with its own director to monitor the airline’s performance
with customers. This group has interviewed over 150 000 passengers each
year. Commenting on the importance of customer research, Michael Batt
stated:
To keep us on track we developed from the market research a very detailed
set of performance measures which tracked every month how our perform-
ance is seen by our customers. Feedback from these measures is communi-
cated to all parts of the company.^13Videopoint interactive video booths at Heathrow and Gatwick give BA’s
customers the opportunity to make immediate comments about the airline.
This is used as feedback for staff as to how customers are feeling and is also
inputted into subsequent corporate training programmes. The company
also runs ‘Customer Forums’ which allow frequent flyer club members to
meet BA’s top 50 managers.
Creating and implementing relationship marketing strategies 465